James Brady of WashingtonPost.com on convergence

Last night James Brady Executive Editor of Washington Post.com was the key note speaker for the Media Convergence conference at Brigham Young University. He shared his perspective on digital convergence with conference participants and BYU students. (Get his presenteation podcast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/convergence/.)

Brady had some interesting points. I liked his perspective that there are 4 types of digital convergence: technical, audience, competitive and information.

• Technical - Multi-function, converged devices like the new video iPods and smart cell phones.
• Audience - The audience is now part of the news process. Blogs and wikis are recent examples. An interesting quote was that audience convergence is "turn[ing] the media business from lecture into a conversation."
• Competitive - Traditional media using production and delivery methods from other mediums. For example, WashingtonPost.com has videographers who produced video news stories for their Website. This is leading to telling the story in various multimedia ways, whatevere are the best way to tell the story(s).
• Information - Pulling Web-based information from multiple sources to suit the audience members interests. RSS subscription feeds for news headlines, blogs and podcasting are examples. Other creative examples are Web developers who are scraping publically available info such as crime statistics and creating interactive maps that show what crimes are happening where in a community.

Another interesting concept was disaggregation of the Web. The idea here is that people use multiple Web sites for specific tasks. This is enabled by using search engines, blogs, RSS feeds, etc. to find the specific info within a Web site without entering from the site's home page. Basically, users go right to what they're interested in and may never see any other part of a Web site. This means the home page is no longer as important in directing users to information in a site. There's no guarantee that information on the home page will be see. That changes the dynamic within organizations where everyone fights to get their link or blurb on the home page.

In the case of WashingtonPost.com, most people come to their site to read a specific article that they found via a search engine, link in a blog or an RSS feed. For Brady that means that each article page has to do a good job of convincing the user to go deeper into the site to look at related information. His strategies are to get people engaged are:

• Links to blogs about this article
• Adding comments links to all articles (coming shortly)
• Byline linking to the reporter
• Creation of topics pages (I presume with links to related information)
• Multimedia video player

The above are intended to get users deeper in the site. He also talked about the need for strategies to increase the frequency of visits (blogs, message boards), increase time at the site (multimedia content, Web tools), and increase habitual use (opinions area, user-generated content).

I found this an informative and thought-provoking presentation from someone in the trenches. I also think his operation, with 100 employees (wow), is leading the evolution of convergence in the newspaper area. Definitely an operation to one's eye on.

Web Documentaries Presentation

I just gave my presentation, "Exploring Convergence and the Web Documentary", at the Media Convergence Conference. The presentation, and those of others presenting, is available as a podcast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/convergence/.

There seemed to be interest in my presentation. An interesting comment/question was about my position that a Web documentary is the personal vision of the author. The questioner felt this went against the nature of the Web as a place where many should participate in authoring. My response was that while that approach, maybe through a wiki site, is one way to do this, that the Web allows many approaches including a personal Web documentary. I had one gentleman come up aftewards and tell me he agreed with my approach and the idea of carrying over some of the approaches from traditional video documentary.

The facilitating of individual voices via the Web and a variety of approaches is one of the powerful aspects of the Web. Anyone can publish and experiment with the communication form. I think its shortsighted to think in terms of only new Web-specific approaches. Every new technology is built on and draws from earlier ones. All are viable and possible on the Web. Bottomline is the Web site communicating effectively to its audience whatever way it does so.

The Website demonstrated as part of the presentation is "TowerReflections: A Web Documentary".

Competing Mediums Encroaching on Each Other

Yesterday I read an article in the "Convergence Newsletter" about a photojournalist who is now an online video journalist. ("Making the Transition from Photojournalist to Vlogger: Convergence in Practice",by Colin Mulvany.) What struct me was that someone with 17 years of still photo experience has jumped in to producing a video blog, he calls it a vlog, for his newspaper, the Spokesman-Review. To do this he's had to learn all about the equipment and video production process. I'm thinking as I read, wouldn't having someone who has 17 years of TV news videography experience been a better way to go? Telling stories with moving images and sound is quite a bit different than capturing the quitessential image that expresses the essence of the story.

Today at the Media Convergence Conference at BYU we discussed podcasting and it was mentioned that newspapers and other media are podcasting, as well as radio stations. What strikes me is that the various traditional mediums are reaching out to use techniques from the others in there foray's into online news. So newspapers are doing multimedia stories with video and TV stations are blogging.

Where is this going? I think that as this continues we'll blur the difference between the mediums of newspaper, TV and radio news. And what I predict is there will be a merging, a form of the converging we've been talking about at the conference, where large media organizations remove the walls of traditional mediums and just do it virtually. Forget the traditional separate enterprises we have now, who are tentatively partnering, but still in competition with each other. And wouldn't it be funny if something like Google made it happen outside traditional media. (This is a reference to the futuristic online video that satirises the future of news as a Google media property.)

An Inspiration Hits

I'm sitting here at Brigham Young University attending the Media Convergence conference. While eating lunch, mulling over ideas I'm having about where the new technologies are driving the mass media, it dawns on me that I should be capturing my thoughts via a blog. So presto, I log on to my Blogger account, create a new blog, which takes all of 5 minutes, and here I am demonstrating one of the new technologies that's changing the news media.